Study finds that ‘fake news’ had NO effect on the outcome of the presidential election

(NationalSentinel) For all the complaints from the angry Left that “fake news” helped propel Donald J. Trump into the White House, now comes scientific evidence debunking that claim.

As reported by StudyFinds.org, a study by researchers at Stanford and New York Universities can assure Americans that the phenomenon did not in any way, shape or form affect the Nov. 8 election:

NYU economics professor Hunt Allcott and Stanford economics professor Matthew Gentzkow led the research. The pair ran a series of tests to determine which fake news articles were circulated, how much of it was circulated, and the amount of voters that believed the stories to be true.

Once they gathered an assortment of fake news stories, Gentzkow and Allcott used fact-checking resources in order to verify that these stories were fake. They then conducted a post-election survey that consisted of 1,200 voters.

Participants were asked what their primary or “most important” source of 2016 election news was. Next, they were presented with a list of true and false news stories, and asked two questions concerning each individual story. The first was whether or not the participant remembered seeing the story. The second question asked whether or not they believed the story.

Although fake news stories in Trump’s favor were shared more times (30 million compared to 8 million for Hillary Clinton), the authors of the report had determined that these stories still did not reach enough voters nationwide to change the election results.

“The average American saw and remembered 0.92 pro-Trump fake news stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake news stories, with just over half of those who recalled seeing fake news stories believing them,” the authors wrote. Yet, “for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads.

“In summary, our data suggest that social media were not the most important source of election news, and even the most widely circulated fake news stories were seen by only a small fraction of Americans,” the study concludes.

Facebook and Google were so quick to believe the false “fake news” narrative they have moved Heaven and earth to implement new policies aimed at ensuring fake stories don’t make their news feeds.

But what this study proves as well is that Hillary Clinton was simply not popular in enough states to win the election on her own merits – and that the Democratic Party’s excuse about “fake news” doing her was a lie the whole time.